Ego is advertising that their Nexus portable power station can power a refrigerator in the case of a power outage, or a microwave for quick dinner cooking. They say you can bring it camping, hiking, boating, tailgating, or anywhere else you might want convenient power.

They say it’s “weather resistant.” There’s no mention of the Nexus portable power station being IP-rated against dust or rain.

It also features “Bluetooth pairing” and “WiFi pairing,” but Ego doesn’t specify what that means. Perhaps there’s an app that notifies you about charge capacity.

The output is a pure sine wave, which Ego says runs cooler and more efficiently.

The Ego Nexus portable power station is powered by Ego 56V Li-ion batteries, requiring just one, but working with up to four.

Examples of what it can power with (2) 7.5Ah batteries:

15A circular saw for 520 cuts of 2×4 lumber

80W 40″ LED TV for 8 hours

80W 40″ LED TV and a lamp with 60W LED bulb, and a 6W WiFI router for 4.4 hours

Crockpock at low setting (70W) for 9 hours

Additional 7.5Ah batteries can provide for longer runtimes.

Ego also points out that, because it doesn’t use gasoline, you can safely use it indoors as well as outdoors. Being battery powered, it’s also quiet.

Price: $1197 for the kit, additional 7.5Ah batteries are $359 each

The Ego PST3042 kit comes with the Nexus power station and (2) 7.5Ah batteries

First Thoughts

There are a lot of questions that come to mind. You can use up to 4 Ego 56V batteries of any size and in any combination, but how does that work? Does it drain them one at a time, or simultaneously, in which case what happens if you use batteries of different capacities?

How long does it take to recharge the batteries when using the Nexus portable power station as a charger? They say overnight, but does that mean 4 hours or 12? Does it charge them one by one, or simultaneously?

The kit is priced at $1197, and two additional 7.5Ah will cost another $718. So that’s $1915 for a 2000W generators with 1680 watt-hour of charge capacity.

For comparison the Goal Zero Yeti 3000 is a 1500W pure sine wave power station with 3000W surge capacity and 3075 watt-hour capacity.

According to Home Depot, the Ego Nexus portable power station weighs 44 pounds.

What kind of remote control or monitoring can be done through the Bluetooth and WiFi connections?

Despite all the unanswered questions, the new Ego Nexus portable power station is a logical and welcome addition to their 56V cordless outdoor power tool lineup.

How does it compare to a gas generator? At the bottom of the Ego Nexus listing, Home Depot has some “similar options you might like” recommendations. There, they advertise a 4-outlet 4000W surge/3500W running gas generator, with 10-hour runtime at 50% load, priced at $249 as a “special buy.”

The Ego Nexus portable power station is advertised for home standby, jobsite, and recreational use. It seems capable for their purposes, but keep the 2000W continuous running wattage in mind. That should be plenty for powering many types of corded power tools.

Having the built-in battery charger is a nice touch, as it means you can plug it in at the end of the day and have it ready to go the next morning.

That it can be powered by 1-4 Ego 56V Li-ion batteries is a surprise, but a very welcome feature. Hopefully they eventually release a power station-only model, without batteries, so that existing Ego users can buy one without taking a full $1200 hit to their wallet.

Fully equipping it with 2 more 7.5Ah batteries will cost another $718 on top of the $1200 for the 2-battery kit. But that’s only if you want to fill all 4 battery bays.

Update: The online manual says:

(600W, 1200W, 2000W) The rated maximum continuous output power depends on the attached battery(s) on the Nexus power station.

What that means is that this is only a 2000W (continuous) when used with Ego’s highest capacity battery (or batteries?). With their smaller batteries, it’s a 1200W power source, or even 600W. On one hand, that does mean that any Ego batteries can give you some juice.

The 2x 7.5Ah battery kit configuration also makes more sense. But that also leads to more questions – what happens when unmatched batteries are connected? If you want to populate the other 2 battery positions with smaller battery packs, does the Nexus power station’s wattage change? With your choice of battery affecting not only charge capacity and runtime, but also wattage output, do you really have a choice? Ego needs to be clearer about how different combinations of batteries affect the Nexus performance.

At this time, Ego says “Works with 1, 2, 3 or 4 Ego batteries of any size, in any combination,” but you have to dig into the user manual to learn that different batteries can reduce the power output rating of the device.

There’s another wattage example in the user manual:

2 batteries BA1400T are located in position 1 and 4. They have 70% and 30% capacity respectively. The rated maximum output power is 1200W.

So, with 2 4.0Ah batteries, it can provide up to 1200W of power. What happens then if you have 2x 7.5Ah batteries and 2x 4.0Ah? This isn’t clear in the product listings, but at least it’s good to be able to see this information on the Nexus’s display.

Do you think this will be a jobsite alternative to gas generators?

Hopefully Ego can answer some of our questions – we’ll follow up once we learn more.

36 Comments

I can’t see these things ever being a replacement for jobsite generators, why constrain yourself to batteries when a more powerful gas generator is the same or less money and runtime is only limited by your gas can.

That said, I think there is a good market for these devices. Photographers/videographers, disaster recovery, powering large led worklights indoors, etc. Hopefully they come down in price as they become more common.

As a commercial photographer I can see some adventurous gear rental house buying one and testing the business model.
LED lighting and small ProFoto-like strobes for stills might make a lot of sense.
But especially on a video/sound friendly location set. Truly “quiet” gas and even trailered diesel generators are never cheap or truly “soundless”. And the cabling to bring the power into a location set equals more time and money.
As for jobsite or home backup I’d say not so much. Lousy ROI.

I don’t have a lot of EGO, in fact I only have 1 battery, but this does interest me. That price though. $1200. whew. When are they coming out with the 4 battery rear-tine tiller? That’s what I’d like to see.

At first I was taken aback by the price, but then after realizing it comes with $700 in batteries, the unit costs $500. A 12v 2000w pure sinewave inverter alone will cost $300, $700 for a good one. So while not cheap, the Ego unit appears to be appropriately priced.

I had similar thoughts. Compare this to a 2000/3000W pure sine wave computer UPS with 0.8KWh worth of batteries. An APC SMT2200 UPS contains 8 [email protected] batteries so 0.768KWh worth of battery storage. And one will set you back about $900 new.

So the Ego price isn’t too far out of line with what you’d pay for other similarly-sized battery-powered inverters.

I cannot believe how much I use and love the DeWalt Portable Power Station. As an even more capable unit, I can see this doing well.

These can be used indoors, in cars, in tents, silently. They stay cool enough that you can walk them around in use. I hardly consider there to be an overlap between these and a portable generator. Everyone that gets their hands on one will find uses for it.

We installed quite a few water-powered sump pumps as emergency backups. They work OK if you have municipal water to “power” them. They may not be as good having a backup whole house generator – but they are economical. Here’s one brand they sell at Home Depot:

14 cells gets you 600W, 28 cells gets you 1200W, and 42 cells or more gets you 2000W. Mix and match any battery combination you like to hit those targets.

The batteries are depleted in parallel. The batteries with the highest charge level will do more work until they discharge to the same level as the others. A large and small battery used at the same time will deplete at the same rate. This is how their dual battery lawnmower and snowblower work.

Yes there is a 10Ah battery coming, it’s been spotted in product manuals.

This is really interesting. The $/kwh is very competitive. If A) the units could be twinned for 30amps output and B) you could simutanously be utilizing that high amperage power while charging I might be sold. I could plug in with say a 15amp extension cord on a jobsite…That would work for running intermitant high power equipment without carrying and setting up heavy gauge wiring into the jobsite from my truck. That could save me 20mins a day of annoying power set up and break down while doing insulation jobs.

Noone uses these type of “generator/inverter” to run a jobsite…the dewalt is different,it runs on batteries we use everyday. Before we had 9ah now it’s 12ah flexvolt batteries,soon I hear 15ah.and it’s just for a punch list type of use,not all day ..
….as an ego owner it could be useful for some pure sinewave needs, camping? if you don’t have a Generac back up generator , I highly recommend getting one for your house.

Your whole-house (you mention the Generac brand) backup generator idea gets a lot of debate in my neck of the woods. I have one at my principal residence (a Kohler – powered by natural gas) that my wife agitated for – and it has come in handy. But I’m not 100% sure that it will ever pay for itself in terms of dollars and cents. It sort of depends on what your local utility reliability is like, what their track record of outages (number and duration) look like and what you might extrapolate for the future. Certainly if someone who lives in your house has special needs requiring 24/7 electric service it can be much more important. Now that I have one – I test it regularly – and it does provide peace of mind during the Northeast storm season.

“Portable power station” is an appropriate name for these. A pox on the jerks who call them generators.

“Overnight charger” is an interesting notion. Can it act as a UPS, providing continuous output even while charging the batteries mounted to it? It sounds like it would be double-conversion, but that’d still be interesting for stuff like refrigerators where it doesn’t draw a ton of power, but you really want to make sure it has power all the time.

BLUETOOTH CONNECTION
Make sure that your phone’s Bluetooth function is turned on and Nexus is nearby. We suggest that you have Nexus added to MY GARAGE in EGO Power+ App before connecting.
1. Turn on your Nexus power station.
2. Go to EGO CONNECT in the EGO Power+ App. The App will automatically search for a connectable Nexus nearby.
3. Select the Nexus you wish to connect, then follow instructions in the App to complete the connection.
4. After successful connection, follow the instructions in the App to begin your remote configuration.

WIFI REMOTE CONNECTION
Nexus is WIFI enabled and can support remote access with the EGO Power+ App. Before you can access Nexus remotely, you need to first add Nexus to your home WIFI:
1. Make sure that the Nexus is nearby and powered on, and make sure that your phone is currently connected to the WIFI you wish add Nexus to.
2. Add Nexus to MY GARAGE before connecting it to WIFI.
3. You can initiate the Nexus WIFI connection after adding Nexus to MY GARAGE or go to the EGO CONNECT Nexus page and select the WIFI icon above the page. The App will lead you through the following processes.

I love the heck out of that idea. Adding a battery to a tiny inverter-generator would make it able to self-start, and to stop the engine during very light load. A built-in battery would be prone to aging and probably be dead when you dig it out of the cobwebs, but if the thing was built to work with your favorite power-tool batteries, those would likely be charged, and it’d be handy to use it as a charging station.

If you could set the battery policy between “I’m using you as a charging station, please keep the packs mostly charged” versus “Go ahead and run deep into hybrid mode, use the batteries however you please”, you could optimize for the behavior you care about, too.

The complexity of a hybrid powertrain is nontrivial, but this could really be a neat project. Bonus points if it also mounts an air-end to provide jobsite air.

I figure it’s only a matter of time before you see one – but by the time that’s connected someone will have an even bigger battery bank.

Used electric car platform batteries are coming on the market for secondary uses. There’s already a number of companies that make block sets of _____ rating for custom uses that are remarkably cheap. The idea being a 50% used electric car battery still has a good bit of life in it – while not so useful for high draw demand siturations – placed in a larger static pack that will get gentle charging and draw use – they will last a number of year at 70% or less of total new capacity.

Anywho I figure in another 2 years you’ll see more on large scale battery storage blocks.

Anyway – I like the idea as stated before the pure sinewave is part of why it costs so much and the batteries are pricey. I expect to see a few of these at the next Ol Piss tailgate (ole miss for those wondering). Or wherever – many of these places are starting to clamp down on generator usage.

Have all the EGO products and love them all! This power station is so quiet we can run it inside our RV to power phones, lights, and my husbands sleep machine. Can’t get the WiFi to run on the app but that’s a small problem.

Replace a generator dont be silly
Provide 24 hr of light internet laptop to a technically / physically challanged home body PRICELESS given the rapidly deteriorating grid in US outside major urban areas
Knowing your family can make it through the nearly weekly hour or two or three outages without having to hear when I get home how hard it was to pull start the generator, then it ran out of gas, ruined shoes refilling it, switching the epower breakers, moving to outlets w power much rather the impossibility of the kids doing this if we’re both at work shopping etc and of course me having to remember to always keep the oil fresh gas tanks topped test running it Again PRICELESS
When I was growing up didn’t have to worry about this, or even e gens in disasters, weren’t any outages worth mentioning Elec cos had enough linemen to keep lines replaced before they wore off the poles, keep trees away, and fix ’em fast if anyone hit a pole.